Commentary |
on Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography by Hester Kaplan
“Her father’s ‘leavings’ — his precipitous departures into his study — felt like ‘a thousand abandonments.’ The people who really mattered to Justin Kaplan weren’t his children but the shadowy subjects of his biographical works.”
Commentary |
on All the World on a Page: A Critical Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, edited by Andrew Kahn & Mark Lipovetsky
“This revelatory book of 34 poems provides a rich field in which the reader can explore Russian history and culture from within, as inner experience, as hope and loss, as will.”
Commentary |
on Reveille, poems by Liza Hudock
“She fixes upon the past and there finds ways of telling that resonate more deeply than a simple act of witness by a survivor.”
Commentary |
on The City in the Distance, essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell
“An affective reportage that gives us a sense of the historical rise of the city, and what it feels like to observe the shapeshifting and forever suspended meaning of what it means to be a city.”
Commentary |
on Far Country, poems by Kyce Bello
“… poetry as incantation, bringing the world into being while also naming what is here already, poetry that asks ‘How do we write new myths?'”
Commentary |
on Wedding of the Foxes, essays by Katherine Larson
“In all her guises — mother, biologist, poet, reader, Japanologist — Larson looks for commonality, itself a form of repair. ‘We are the natural world. We are the world’s body. There is no separation.'”
Commentary |
on Playing Wolf, a novel by Zuzana Říhová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker
“… a rural horror story exploring what happens when a middle-aged couple trades their ceramic cooktop in Prague’s ultra-hip Holešovice neighborhood for a gas stove that must be lit by matches in a one-pub village.”
Commentary |
on Avidyā, poetry by Vidyan Ravinthiran
“Vidyan Ravinthiran reflects on what ignorance gives rise to and how it persists, through the Sri Lankan civil war that began in 1983 and ended 2009.”
Commentary |
on The Fire Passage, poems by Lisa Wells
“In her wish for phoenix-like resurrection, she always admits a profound uncertainty, yet the underlying song is her compass.”
Commentary |
on Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues, a novel by Kim de L’Horizon, translated from the German by Jamie Lee Searle
“Part novel, part essay, autofiction, and poetry, the book explores the invisible burdens of inherited trauma, gender, and identity, seeking out alternative, empowering forms of knowledge through linguistic deconstruction.”
Commentary |
on Whites, stories by Mark Doten
“… a severe and splashy collection, peopled by caricatures and steeped in melodrama, bundled together by Doten’s skill as a mimic and his world-class facility with experimental narrative structures.”
Commentary |
on Discontent, a novel by Beatriz Serrano, translated from the Spanish by Maya Faye Lethem
“The novel explores the limits of duplicity, and whether, and at what point, a person inevitably becomes the thing they perform.”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Novels: on Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin, Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben, The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Portraits of a Mother, stories by Shūsaku Endō & Stay With Me by Hanne Ørstavik
“Sea, Poison, for all its eccentricities, makes a surprisingly sturdy sense of its own, and its gestures and form are more shapely than they may seem at first.”
Commentary |
on From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation, essays by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel
“He suggests that a translator ‘is someone who has a complete cultural understanding of a situation, and that this is what is imparted, rather than a mere conveyance or transferal from one language to another.'”
Commentary |
on Absence, a novel by Issa Quincy & The Hairdresser’s Son by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
“As the narrator notes, whether absence is triggered by a scent, or neurological damage, or the anonymity of sitting alone in a coffee shop, the sensation is one every soul knows all too well.”